Chapter XVII: The Revolutionary Spirit in Prose Literature & the Drama (1)

“_I have intended to rehabilitate the pariah, whatever form it
may take; whether it be a buffoon, like Triboulet, a
courtesan, like Marion Delorme, a poisoner, like Lucrezia
Borgia, the oppressed, like the people. Those who say that I
have practised art for art’s sake say a silly thing. No one,
more than I, has practised art for society and humanity. I
have always worked for this end, and have known what I wished
to do_.”—VICTOR HUGO.

“_We know what it cost the First Empire to have displeased
Châteaubriand, what it cost Louis Philippe to have offended
Lamartine, Napoleon III. to have vexed Victor Hugo_.”—GASTON
DESCHAMPS.

“_The aptitude for commerce is an inferior aptitude. There are
multitudes of banks in which fortunes are perpetuated. Is
there an unbroken line of Hugos, of Ampères, of Courbets,
which progresses incessantly from father to son? Commerce is
an absurd criterion of merit, base in itself and still more
degrading when it is regulated by laws like ours._”

Hélier, in ROSNY’S Le Bilatéral.

“_This morning I received the visit of the police commissary,
my neighbour, accompanied by four alcoholics. They turned
everything topsy-turvy in my rooms, mixed up my
correspondence, rumpled my collection of prints, and all to
seize, at the end, a wood-cut of Maurin and the works of
Tolstoy._”

Meyrargues, in VICTOR BARRUCAND’S Avec le Feu.

“_I believe it is impossible to-day for a great mind not to be
somewhat anarchistic._”—AUGUSTIN FILON.

“_My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the
individual outside of all rules and of all social
necessities_.”—EMILE ZOLA.

Whatever may be the verdict of posterity regarding the literary and philosophical activity of this restless, problematic period, the verdict of the contemporary world seems to be that Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola are the three biggest literary philosophers (or philosophical littérateurs) of their day and generation; and it is a noteworthy fact, to put it mildly, that the attitude towards society of each one of these three intellectual giants is, more or less openly, revolutionary. All three may be claimed by the parties of revolt without any considerable forcing of the note.

Tolstoy, by reason of his adoration of Jesus, his insistence on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, his advocacy of non-resistance as the most effective form of resistance, and his attempts to incorporate liberty in education and, by education, in life, seems to fall naturally enough into the category of the “Christian anarchist.” But, whether Tolstoy be a “Christian anarchist” or a “Christian socialist,” as certain Christian socialists rather presumptuously claim, is immaterial. He is opposed to the established order, and belongs indisputably with the revolutionists.

Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either to themselves or to him.

The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so easy to define.

Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness bordering on advocacy the sufferings and struggles of the labourers, and stated with perfect fairness the most revolutionary ideas and ideals. That he had in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works, and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, the _propagandiste par le fait_.

Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine of _Germinal_ to the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincere _propagandiste par le fait_ was explained, excused, admired, extolled by him.

This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an advocate of the _propagande par le fait_. He extended an equal cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic, in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative, that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.

Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a poet than either. His later works, and _Germinal_ at least among his earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had of instituting devil-worship.

It is not normal for the poet to have a coherent system, and it is extremely doubtful if Zola had one. Still, the poet must have, like other mortals, his personal point of view; and Zola’s personal point of view (which is not for a moment to be confounded with his point of view as a poet) seems to have been that of the scientists of his novels,—anarchistic as to end, but evolutionary as to means: the attitude of Guillaume Froment in _Paris_, who saw in “unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by attraction, by free and ardent love, the only scientific theory of society,” and who “dreamed of the emancipated individual evolving, expanding without any restraint whatsoever, for his own good and for the good of all.” The attitude of Bertheroy (_Paris_), “who worked, in the seclusion of his laboratory, for the ruin of the present superannuated and abominable régime, with its God, its dogmas, its laws, but who desired also repose, too disdainful of useless acts to join in the tumults of the street, preferring to live tranquil, rich, recompensed, in peace with the government (whatever it might be), all in foreseeing and preparing the formidable issue of to-morrow,”—the Bertheroy who says: “I have only contempt for the vain agitations of politics, revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Of what use is it to wish to hurry things when a single step of science does more to advance humanity towards the city of justice and truth than a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Science alone is revolutionary: it alone can make not only truth, but justice prevail, if justice is ever possible here below. Of a certainty, it alone brushes away dogmas, expels the gods, creates light and happiness. It is I, member of the Institute, rich and decorated, who am the only revolutionist.” The attitude of Jordan (_Travail_), “a completely emancipated spirit, a tranquil and terrible evolutionist, sure that his labour will ravage and renew the world.... According to Jordan, it is science solely that leads humanity to truth, to justice, to final happiness, to the perfect city of the future towards which the peoples are so slowly and painfully advancing.”

All things considered, it would not be unfair, perhaps, to address to Zola himself the words which he made this Jordan speak to the reforming hero of _Travail_, Luc Froment: “Only, my noble friend, you are nothing more nor less than an anarchist, complete evolutionist as you believe yourself; and you have every reason to say that, while it is with the formula of Fourier that we must begin, it is by _l’homme libre dans la commune libre_ that we must end.” And, if Zola had been thus addressed, it is not unlikely that he would have replied laughingly, as he made his Luc reply, “At any rate, let’s begin; and we shall see in due time whither logic leads us.”

There is no doubt possible regarding Zola’s belief in a good time coming. His later books were fairly saturated with a sublime faith almost childlike. There is also no doubt that he believed that science consecrated to the service of humanity is quite capable of regenerating the world, as he indicated by the communistic experiment of Luc in _Travail_. But whether he believed that science _will_ be consecrated to the service of humanity or whether he was presenting a method which might be employed, and which he simply hoped, almost against hope, would be so employed, is not so clear. Thus, in the last chapter of _Travail_, after giving a beautiful picture of the superb results of the peaceable revolution accomplished through the altruistic initiative of Luc in the commune of Beauclair, he added a sort of apocalyptic vision of the happenings in the principal divisions of the big world outside, in which the same superb results have been secured by violence,—by a bloody, socialistic _coup d’état_, by the multiplication of anarchistic bombs, by a universal war,—quite as if he would say to the classes in power: “I have shown you how society may be renewed. I have shown you the way of your salvation, the only way. If you would but walk in this way, you might save yourselves and the world with you. But you will not. You are too stupid, too selfish, too obstinate, too corrupt. You will not. I have known you only too long, and I know you will not. Well, then, so much the worse for you! Expropriation, massacre, annihilation, await you!”

If you ask intellectual Frenchmen, without distinction of social position or political faith, who is the foremost living French man of letters, five out of six will answer, without an instant’s hesitation, Anatole France. Less pictorial, less colossal, and less epic than Zola, but more penetrating and more profound; æsthetic and erudite (in the good old-fashioned sense of the latter word), subtile, suave, and refined; abundantly endowed with the humour and the wit in which Zola was deficient; as impeccable in point of language and style as Zola was careless, as measured as Zola was violent, as gentle as Zola was brutal, as finished as Zola was crude; as perfect an embodiment of the Greek spirit as Zola, if he had only had a keener sense of the grotesque, would have been of the Gothic,—Anatole France is none the less a redoubtable iconoclast,—the most redoubtable iconoclast of his generation, perhaps. A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” M. France is one of these rare men. He combines the amiable doubt of Montaigne with the mocking irreverence of Voltaire and the subversive grace of Renan. “The end which M. France seems to pursue persistently,” says one of his literary brethren, “is the demolition of the social edifice by the force of a logic tinctured with irony, without anger, and without phrases. By as much as Zola, Tailhade, and Mirbeau are ardent and passionate when they attack society, by so much is M. France calm and feline; but he is not, on that account, the less to be feared.”

As the most eminent living representative of the best classic traditions of French prose, M. France is the idol of the lettered youth of France. From admiration of form to acceptance of the substance underlying the form is but a step. His ideas insinuate themselves consequently into the very penetralia of culture,—that exquisite culture which brooks the presence of nothing common or unclean,—and they act as a disintegrating force in circles where downright revolutionary propaganda cannot enter.

In his writings, Anatole France is the precise intellectual counterpart—at every point but that of Catholicism, and even here his passion for Augustine, Chrysostom, and the other Church Fathers deters him from displaying an uncomely asperity—of his own adorable creation, l’Abbé Coignard,[105] the “delicious Catholic _révolté_, who juggles with principles and human institutions as if they were a Merry Andrew’s painted spheres; the railing anarchist who lashes with jests and whose only bombs are _bons mots_.” And the best characterisation it is possible to give of M. France, the genial iconoclast, is to repeat certain of his observations on the character of his Abbé and certain of the sayings he puts into his Abbé’s mouth,—which I accordingly do in the following detached paragraphs, making no pretence of preserving in the translation the peculiar savour and charm of the original:—

OF THE CHARACTER OF JERÔME COIGNARD.

“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and
never accepted without examination the common opinion, except
in what had to do with the Catholic faith in which he was
immovable.

“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of
Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi.... He preserved, in his
boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful
promenader.... It is certain that the world, to his eyes,
resembled less the deserts of the Thébaïde than the gardens of
Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious
ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character
and the elemental principle of his teaching.”

“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so
pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness.... He
despised men with tenderness. He endeavoured to teach them
that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in
themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can
cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”

“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his
fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their
philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that
their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed
anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically,
and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest
works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them
only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the
children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”

“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant
soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are
burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part,
it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”

“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature
had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would
have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his
universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”

SOME OF JERÔME COIGNARD’S SAYINGS.

_Of Society and Governments_:

“After the destruction of all the false principles, society
will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws
of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall
have dethroned Jupiter.”

“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his
portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor
prevent us from living.”

“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are
governed in one fashion or another, and ministers are
imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”

“These assemblies [parliaments] will be founded upon the
confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the
issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They
will impose on the heads of the government the task of
executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full
consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate
than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the
other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed
the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the
answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves
to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become
rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent
which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them.
They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the
least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than
the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the
most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of
arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising
affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will
be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”

_Of the Army_:

“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is
that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most
easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not
all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I
am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give
him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will
be content.... The military condition has this also in keeping
with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein;
and it is clear that we were not made to think.”

“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and
could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the
end of the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a
sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue
and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and
these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has
with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is
naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to
glory.”

“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the
chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with
shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessities
of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the
contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that
Christians should continue to honour the trade of butcher and
headsman when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a
word, among civilised peoples the illustriousness of the
citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage
they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”

_Of the Academy_:

“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he
who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it
is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an
Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden
and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He
celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all
the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”

“The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Séez
neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not graven in
the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big
register.”

“If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more
polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity
triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you
find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils
of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one
need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends
to control usage and which can only follow it?

“The _Académistes_ or _Académiciens_ were instituted, as you
know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to
purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity,
and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another
Montaigne, _tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la
province_.”

“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is
rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to
do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as
easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrart?”

_Of Justice, Courts, and Judges_:

“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it;
but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is
unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human
liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a
justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order,
and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often
little part, and which are sometimes accomplished
unconsciously.”

“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human
justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which
is generally opposed to it.”

“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our
Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the
halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him
and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine
hands.”[106]

“What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not
show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their
dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in
themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of
view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the
interests of this mass of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses
which constitute communities, and of which they (the judges)
are the blind conservators.”

“Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and
their justest justice is crude and superficial.... They are
men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the
strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their
sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult
to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their
personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of
their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the
State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of
good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether
they are excellent or detestable.... Furthermore, it should be
observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his
function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are
all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices
which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced
from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever
so little meditative and free that does not feel how much
there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the
right to feel it.”

“By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined
to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so
terrible to certain European peoples that they have them
assisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot.
From which it appears that chance, in its blindness,
guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the
enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these
impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are
held well outside the affair of which they see only the
exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the
laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simply
to decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply
them. We are told that assizes of this sort give absurd
results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established
them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I
easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts
rendered in this fashion, which may be inept and cruel, but of
which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak,
attributable to nobody. Injustice seems tolerable when it is
sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary.”

“Just now this little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment
of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves
and assassins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and
assassination that I cannot endure even the copy of them
regularised by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that
judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and
homicides than by imitating them. For, after all,
Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the
death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated
with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice
merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an
evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling
misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and
symmetry?

“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour
and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can
reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws
by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route.”

But for the historic setting, the turn of the phrase, and the absence of bitterness, one might fancy himself reading the contemporary anarchist organs, _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and _Le Libertaire_.

Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is prone to them. He fears nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in nothing, not even in his own unbelief. “If ever M. Anatole France,” says Gaston Deschamps, “seeks martyrdom, it will be to confess the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no truth”; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M. Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of this chapter.

In spite of the dilettante humour or, to be more accurate, the dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not remain within his _tour d’ivoire_ during that strange Dreyfus affair which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator—for one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of Jerôme Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired why he would “reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies”:—

“My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come
to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come
from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults.
It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all
the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the
pick here and there in the walls of the cellar and garden to
frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins.”

M. France has not yet gone back into the _tour d’ivoire_ from which the irresistible “Affair” drew him. He is a member of the executive committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organisation of the _Universités Populaires_; he presided on the occasion of the Victor Hugo Centennial over a gigantic mass meeting of the latter, in which he gave “a little blow of the pick” to clericalism; and in 1903 he contributed an introduction to Premier Combes’ volume _Campagne Laïque_, in defence of anti-clericalism.

At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the anarchists, he said:—

“_Citoyens_, master-spirits who are our friends have come here
to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher.
As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you
Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of
Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and
of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.

“He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the
great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades
looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious
aristocracies.

“_Citoyens_, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge,
of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and
threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that
which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have
had a happy inspiration in singling out for honour the memory
of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work,
knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future,
announced the new era, the coming of the proletariat into a
pacified and comforted world.

“His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our
future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot,
whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one
hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is
ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the
proletariat.”

Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave Mirbeau (to whom M. France’s _Jerôme Coignard_ was dedicated) is the fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as either. He surpasses every living French writer in portraying the monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and disgust; and his irony—too often fulminated, in violation of the commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic to him—rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying to the last degree; “one of those combative natures,” says Eugène Montfort, “who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the nature of an animate being, ... breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life.”

His _Calvaire_, as he himself puts it, “strips war of all its heroism.” His _Journal d’une Femme de Chambre_ is the most complete and awful arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,—and here his resemblance to Swift ceases,—infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and chivalry for the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardour, high aspiration, and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.

M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean Grave’s most famous volume, and played a leading rôle in the Dreyfus affair.

His _chroniques_ are daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile, insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are passionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels, though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the anarchist library lists.

Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.

Descaves demonstrated in his first volume—a collection of short stories entitled _Le Calvaire d’Héloïse Pajadin_—the depressing and degrading influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; his _La Colonne_ portrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and his _Soupes_ exposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves’ specialty is the army: it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by these works he is best known.

In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds of pages he holds the reader’s attention to the flat, stale, and unprofitable barrack life,—to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony, physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,—a life entirely lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar become alternately tragic and grimly comic; and his _Sous-Offs_ and _Emmurés_, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of the _Académie Goncourt_, are almost classics of their kind. Less exalted and less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite destitute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpasses Zola in the latter’s much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic details.

Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog’s fixity of purpose in the matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events of the last few years. His _Sous-Offs_, though entirely free from doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations, an encounter with the law. No other novel—indeed, no other work of this generation, unless it be Bruant’s _chanson_, _Biribi_—has exerted so profound an anti-militarist influence in France.

In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in the _Revue Blanche_ a series of articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of “_Le Pain Gratuit_” (free bread); and on the occasion of the municipal elections of that year he placarded the principal communes of France with the following appeal:—

“TO THE PEOPLE.

“The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always
been to create division in order to reign.

“WORKERS!

“Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are
the dupes.

“Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.

“Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but
let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior
power, ‘GIVE US (_Donnez-nous_) OUR DAILY BREAD’; for manna
will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres.
But let us say, ‘GIVE OURSELVES’ (_Donnons-nous_)! We can, if
we will it, affirm with solidarity true LIBERTY FOR ALL.

“Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies,
and let us constitute the great party of men with hearts upon
this question of bread, proclaiming THE RIGHT TO LIVE (_le
droit à la vie_) without humiliating conditions.

“Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like
the water of the fountains, the lights of the streets, and the
streets themselves.

“We have free instruction, which profits only those who can
receive instruction. Let us organise, more justly, LE PAIN
GRATUIT for the profit and the liberty of all the workers.

“Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms.
Let it be no more the derisive price with which the labourer,
nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of
death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has
not found a way to sell himself.

“THE PEOPLE MUST SPEAK OUT LOUD AND FIRM! THEY MUST DICTATE
THEIR TERMS!

“Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated
programmes. Let us vote for LE PAIN GRATUIT! Let there be no
political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who
are with us, and be on our guard against the false
philanthropists who promise more butter than bread.

“Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of
a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND
RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.

“Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the
people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace
the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of
the masses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us
vote for the idea which cannot betray us.

“LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!

“VICTOR BARRUCAND.”[107]

In _Avec le Feu_, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M. Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual _élite_, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.

The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its restlessness and yearning:—

“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and
saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed
the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable
cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He
roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of
souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern,
the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back
shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity,
his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that
labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of
lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly,
dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of
ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A
savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his
heroic sleep.”

The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide, which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its stead.

It would be unfair to class M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand’s philosophy as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his attitude in his other works—notably in his two historical biographies, _La Vie Véritable du Citoyen Rossignol_, _Vainqueur de la Bastille_, and _Mémoires et Notes de Choudieu, Représentant du Peuple_—and his identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively in the ranks of revolt.

Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.” “I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.

Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:—

Georges Darien, author of _Biribi-Armée d’Afrique_, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,[108] author of _Sous la Casaque_, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of _Sous le Sabre_; Marcel Lami, author of _La Débandade_; Louis Lamarque, author of _Un An de Caserne_; Paul Brulat, author of _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, _Le Nouveau Candide_, _La Gangue_, and _Eldorado_, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of the _Congrès Régional_ of Paris (1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of _En l’Anarchie_; Henri Rainaldy, author of _Delcros_, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author of _Le Régicide_; Marcel Schwob, author of _Spicilege_; Mme. Sévérine, author of _Pages Rouges_; Frantz Jourdain, author of _L’Atelier Chanterel_; Zéphirin Raganasse, author of _Fabrique de Pions_; Louis Lumet, author of _La Fièvre_; M. Reepmaker, author of _Vengeance_; Théodore Chèze, Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the _feuilletoniste_ Michel Zevacco.

A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sébastien Faure with his _romans-feuilletons_ and Jean Grave with his _Malfaiteurs_, his military romance, _La Grande Famille_, and his book for boys, _Les Aventures de Nono_.

The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J.-H. Rosny’s[109] romance, _Le Bilatéral_. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professed _révoltés_, to protest against “_La Cruauté Contemporaine_,” is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be classed as an agitator.

Like the hero of this romance (Hélier, the “Bilatéral,” who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impassive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equally far from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.

“To think,” says the Bilatéral to his _doctrinaire_ socialist
and anarchist friends, “that there are multitudes of brave
souls like you who, like you, see only white and black.
Nothing but white and black! Why, _citoyens_, the complex is
grey, all shades of grey.”

Again he says: “You see, my dear” (he is speaking to an ardent
socialist girl), “that in the things of the social order we
meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to
assert;—‘it is this’ or ‘it is that.’ Generally, between
_this_ and _that_ there are an endless number of points to
elucidate.... There is a high civilisation with plenty of
grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already
so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a
nest and nourishment; ... and those above are stupid, and
those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My God!
dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might
indeed hope for a consoling solution.”

Still, again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: “‘History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly—oh, so slowly!—through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,—you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, bloody, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of ‘93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.’

“‘Bravo!’ exclaimed the bourgeois.

“‘I have nothing to do with your bravos!’ cried the
Bilatéral, with a shade of nervousness. ‘If their ignorance
saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of
protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous
minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no
purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival
powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race
of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this
pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-scrapers and
the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a button to
annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.’”

Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny’s, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudère, Augustin Léger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Chenevière. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.

It seems that Emile Henry’s favourite book, his “_livre de chevet_,” the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes’ _Don Quixote_. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humourists Meilhac, Halévy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courtéline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet’s _Jack_, Goncourt’s _Fille Elisa_, and Loti’s _Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort_; books of aspiration, like Prévost’s _Confessions d’un Amant_ and Bourget’s _Terre Promise_; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’s _Morticoles_; of “revolt against Puritanism,” like Pierre Louys’ _Aphrodite_; of energy, like Barrès’ _Déracinés_; of searching, like Huysmanns’ _Cathédrale_; of regret, like Bazin’s _Terre qui Meurt_; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupassant’s _Bel-Ami_; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,—may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners (little as their authors would wish it) of violent change,—of revolt and revolution!

All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.

Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers[110] who are more or less militant iconoclasts and _révoltés_, the most important are:—

A. Ferdinand Hérold, who expounds his attitude as follows: “From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,—ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself”; Camille Mauclair, who says: “If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself.... Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honour for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world”; Bernard Lazare,[111] who says: “Authority, its value, and its _raison d’être_ are things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circumstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously, or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all”; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, entitled _L’Enfermé_; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in the _Mercure de France_, “We are all anarchists, thank God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author of _L’Armée contre la Nation_; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor of _La Raison_, and Henri Bérenger, editor of _L’Action_, who have acted together in exciting the masses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux;[112] Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles of _l’amour libre_; Christian Cornélissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Léopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue,[112] B. Guineaudau, Auguste Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fournière, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Félix Fénéon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer,[112] Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressensé, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugène Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.

In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication called _L’Endehors_[113] (_The Outsider_) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d’Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Félix Fénéon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fèvre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Hérold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Méry, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin.

The journal bore by way of epigraph this phrase of its leading spirit and director, Zo d’Axa: “_Celui que rien n’enrôle et qu’une impulsive nature guide seule, ce hors la loi, ce hors d’école, cet isolé chercheur d’au delà, ne se dessine-t-il pas dans ce mot, L’Endehors?_”

It explained its purpose as follows: “We belong neither to a party nor to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is _endehors_, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves over to our compassions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being ourselves.”

The first number of _L’Endehors_ appeared in May, 1891, immediately after the massacre of Fourmies,—in which old men, women, and children, among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,—and dealt bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.

The staff of _L’Endehors_ defended and even glorified Ravachol. Mirbeau’s “_Apologie de Ravachol_” (referred to above) is one of the finest bits of impassioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam’s “_Eloge de Ravachol_” is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:—

“Politics would have been banished completely from our
preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift
of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared
in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.... At the end of
all these judicial proceedings, _chroniques_, and calls to
legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator
of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled
the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the
world,—the abnegation of one’s self, of one’s life, and one’s
good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor.
Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential
sacrifice....

“He saw suffering round about him, and he has ennobled the
suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His
incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his
acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the
splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A
SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which
new courages and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of
universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of
the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated.
An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the
annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open
a new era.”

_L’Endehors_ prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article entitled “_Notre Complot_,” Vaillant’s attempt against the Chamber;[114] and the ex-members of its staff participated, after its supposition had become a fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant’s tomb. The indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so intense that M. Magnard in _Le Figaro_ uttered a vigorous protest against “_la Vaillantolâtrie_”; and the most orthodox writers in the most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which _L’Endehors_ had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and social reforms.